Punk’s Reviews > Bashō's Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passages > Status Update

The rules for composing renga sound like something Jim Kirk would make up.

Bashō: a fact
Sato, four hundred years later: Actually...

Fleas and lice: a horse pisses right near my pillow

Glad to see Sato went with the much more evocative "pissing" than the weaker, though perhaps more accurate, "piddles" I've seen elsewhere.

This translation goes down easy, but the text reads like something from a small town paper, filled with people and places it makes no effort to describe.

Not only does this have footnotes, it has endnotes...which I only just now discovered.

From a footnote: "Legend has it that a storm used to arise twice a year from the cave northeast of this mountain."

Really feels like I stumbled into a Zelda game and some old guy behind a waterfall is telling me I need to get over there and defeat a storm with my boomerang and magic whistle.

So glad to have this in print with the haiku in one line and all the footnotes on the opposite page for maximum convenience.

Compulsively tracking this package. Should get here tomorrow!

The title of this was driving me around the corner because it sounded like Sato only translated part of Oku no Hosomichi, but I compared it to another translation and everything's here except for a postscript that Yuasa includes.